Impactful Dashboards!

The first two chapters showed you how to work with data and create visualizations. This chapter is all about building impactful dashboards and analytic applications. An analytic application brings analytics to the masses: providing users with an application that they can use to get work done, which is driven by analytics and has analytics at its core.

It's all very well to produce a set of impactful or cool visualizations that shows you a picture of the data. However, it's really worth spending some extra time considering how the analysis is presented and how easy it is for you and others to change options and parameters in order to guide other users through the analysis.

Even the most static dashboard-style report will usually benefit from the inclusion of some form of user-definable parameters, and a visually appealing and well-annotated analysis will draw people in and encourage engagement. Visualization titles, information and instructions, and good overall layout and organization are essential design principles.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• KPI charts - the basis of any analytics dashboard
• Framing your analysis using text areas
• Custom expressions
• Document properties
• Property controls
• Marking
• Enabling end users to configure a KPI chart interactively
• Drilling into the KPI chart
• A deep dive into the insights you can find in a dashboard
• Publishing a dashboard to Spotfire Web, with a brief introduction to the Spotfire library

At the end of this chapter, you will be ready to share your work with others by publishing it to Spotfire's Web clients!